A Dog Agility Blog with day to day observations and dog agility antics.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Getting a little fun in our day

Clearly me moping around the house feeling sorry for myself is at an end. Flu or no flu, we are getting our butts outta bed and doing some stuff. I am even going to open up work email and get some work done!

But before I do anything drastic like work, I took the dogs out for some fun. Olive worked on her contacts then had some fun doing search and rescue for her tennis ball.

I love video. It takes a training session that you feel is pretty successful and shows you how many rewards were wrongly placed. Although much of the time I like to live the fantasy that my training is always perfect, I've come to truly appreciate video for what it shows.

Take for example the minute of training above (actually probably more like 4 minutes of actual training that I cropped down). I really felt that I was rewarding for hold her head down and not moving her feet. The number of rewards that were given when her head is up and her feet are moving is amazing to me. I need to be more careful and make sure to reward the behavior I am looking for not the behavior I am getting.

In class last week my mentor Moe told me that Olives feet were moving and I needed to work on her holding her feet still. Later that evening, I was running Fin and she hit her contact and I noticed her feet dancing about. I pointed this out to Moe and stated, "I'm nothing if not consistent!" Oh how I want to improve, yet keep training the same dam behaviors dog after dog. I actually think it is rather funny.

Olive is a master of the find-it game. She takes it to new heights. I think our searches are the kinder gentler version of a barn hunt. On the back of my property, I make her sit-stay and I walk around pretending to hide the ball. I try to be really sneaky. She then gets to go out and "find-it". We play many versions of this game.

Working on scent work is so interesting. On cold wet morning with no wind the scent seems to almost soak into the ground and it is harder for her to find things. On a day like today with the breeze blowing and every once in a while a gust the scent seemed to be very active.